I enjoyed this one. The premise is that the gravitational force in a distant universe is a billion times stronger. Stars are tiny, and burn out in thousands rather than billions of years. A human ship falls into the universe by accident, and propped up by harsh social divisions, ekes out an existence there...until the nebula supporting life starts to die.

The theme of "lost arcane lore of the ancients" is ubiquitous in fantasy books, and is present here in spades. The protagonist, Rees, is gradually educated to the highest standard of his society, which unfortunately has no true understanding of many of the relics of ancient Earth.

Once an author has explored the scientific idea that makes a book "sci-fi" in the first place, the social and fantasy aspects would need to be pretty compelling for me to want to read further, and that is tremendously rare. Flat characterisation should never be a criticism of the genre, just an observation. This book doesn't transcend that boundary. It is just fine as a stand alone book, but does not tempt me to read the rest of the series which it apparently spawned.

Not quite working for me.. book one of the Xeelee sequence - an alternate dimension where gravity works very differently. Humans living on the 'raft' struggle to survive several generations after their ancestors arrived. The Scientist class is bent on preserving knowledge but even they cannot help against entropy